5 reasons to measure collaboration

Collaboration projects are often political, conceptual and difficult to discuss in the corporate world because they induce dealing with human behaviour. How far can we look into employee behaviour in the workplace? Not that far, it’s still a touchy subject as a confusion is made between individual productivity and collaboration or teamwork. A way of analysing human behaviour is through collaboration usage, which is purely targeting working habits.

So why measure them?

5 bad reasons to measure collaboration

The purpose of these bad reasons is to exclude some of the common discussions arising when analysing collaboration will not help you boost collaboration in the long run:

5 good reasons to measure collaboration

#1 audit collaboration with tangible information

Whether your company starts a collaboration project with some existing experience or has started without planning, auditing with an analytics tool is useful to understand how your company collaborates.

> who are the users: not only an exhaustive list, but identifying if they are monthly or daily users, contributors or viewers, working on a particular project, from which department or country…)

> which content is popular (document, blog posts, newsfeeds)

> within groups and sites, which features are mostly used, what are the user persona (based on different criteria)

> what are the reasons of success, productivity and synergy (for a project, international teams, small or bigger firms)

From this audit you will get effective information highlighting the positive and the negative outcomes to see the opportunities or obstacles to deploy collaboration tools.

#2 Select the KPIs corresponding to your company’s goals

Your company has purchased Office 365 licences and you have been asked to deploy it.

From this starting point, set quantitative objectives to measure the number of connected users and quantity of activities occuring on the plateform. A clear view of activity growth is at your disposal.

The rolling out of such a platform begins with a slow on-boarding process, then a quick viral enthousiam generating a pick of connections (generated by corporate communications or events). But unfortunately, users often end up being lost, unfamiliar with the tool, afraid to share their work or thoughts publicly. Some will not see ahead the positive consequences of their collaboration, and will prefer not to take action. Engagement will slowly decrease until reaching a low cruising pace.

To avoid observing this discouraging adoption curve, you will need to set ambitious achievements, supported by with a realistic and down-to-earth action plan.

We often hear: “digital transformation is the main ambition of collaboration tool”. But, what does it mean?

Goals must be linked to the company’s business strategy, and decide how using the digital tools will help a team/department to work toward the business objectives.

#3 Customize your training and communication plan

Once you have set the objectives and understood the different type of collaboration profiles in your company, you can taylor a specific and efficient training plan.

Often, when launching a new platform, a single training program is assigned to everyone without details and considerations. There is no educational process.

So if you design training program for each profile type by improving their daily tasks, the users will be more likely to integrate the tools on a regular basis.